Tech

This Site Predicts Your Success on Kickstarter

Millions of people donated to Kickstarter in 2013. In total, three million donors gave $480 million to 19,000 projects that were successfully funded, according to the site.

But all that success masks the fact that most projects fail. Kickstarter campaigns have a 43% success rate. Donors pledged, but did not pay, $122 million to 76,000 campaigns that failed to reach their goals. Now one site is looking to improve those numbers.

Prefundia is a platform for product developers to gauge interest in their project before launching a Kickstarter or IndieGoGo campaign. Using a mix of data points, such as page views and followers, Prefundia predicts the odds of a project reaching its funding goals.

More than a thousand projects have already used Prefundia, and 318 are currently in the works. Co-founder Jeff Schwarting says Prefundia users had success rates 689% higher than a crowdsourced campaign that did not use it. Its users raised, on average, 412% more money than a regular Kickstarter.

Schwarting also says that the top 10% of Prefundia's performers go on to raise about 14 times more than its bottom 90 percent. "The model just works," says Schwarting. "People who build a community first and launch second see much greater success than those who launch first and try to build a community second."

Now Prefundia is opening its platform to mobile app entrepreneurs. Around 2,000 mobile apps enter the iOS and Android market per day, compared to a mere hundred daily Kickstarter projects. He expects Prefundia's client base to increase tenfold with the opportunity for app developers to gauge interest in their idea and analyze data — not to mention build a fan base.

"They can push their fans to download the app as soon as it is made available, which will increase the app's popularity," says Schwarting.

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